


To Halve and to Hold

by misscam



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-24
Updated: 2008-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-17 12:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misscam/pseuds/misscam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>How do you share a grief great enough to consume you both?</i> [Adama/Roslin]</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Halve and to Hold

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Revelations". For miri_d, sort of. I'm sorry I couldn't write exactly what you wanted, but my brain is a weird place. Title is very much intentional. Much thanks to lyricalviolet for beta.

To Halve and to Hold  
by **misscam**

Disclaimer: Not my characters, just my words.

II

Somewhere above the clouds, Laura knows, there's a sun. There's a star, filtered through space and atmosphere to become a sun, to vanish for night and hold for day. A sun, to steer seasons, effect weather and follow humans. There is a sun.

She just can't see it.

Earth is cold, a light rain and a relentless whisper of a wind seeming to sap all warmth out of her. It isn't just the weather, she knows. It's disappointment, bearing down on her like a glacier and leaving her just as cold.

She's had to step away from the others, find solitude behind the empty shell of a building and the ruins of their dreams.

For this. Deaths, sacrifices, visions and hope. For _this_.

Earth, she thinks, and can't think anymore. Can't consider implications, can't think up a strategy, can't see where to go next. Earth. Earth and nothing more.

Bill's hand on her shoulder startles her for a moment. Last she saw him, he was talking in a low voice to Helo and Kara. Recons, she's pretty sure. Discover if all the planet is like this. She isn't sure she wants to know yet. If it's habitable, there's that. If it's not, there's that too.

In this light even Bill's eyes look grey, she notes, and wishes he would close them. She can't take this too now. Can't carry his grief too. Can't, can't, can't, can't, and has to.

How do you share a grief great enough to consume you both? Where do you start?

"I'm not sure I like your hat," she says, the single most trivial of all her concerns, the one she can voice without breaking. It really is a silly hat, and she isn't sure if he wears it against the wind or the rain. No one else wears one. They've all bared their heads for Earth and he is wearing a hat. Or a cap. She isn't even sure what it is.

He looks at her for a moment, probably knowing what she doesn't say. She sure knows what he isn't, his whole stance screaming it. He doesn't say anything at all. He doesn't have to.

He kisses her instead, hat still on, a hand on her hip as he pushes her against him. Not the kiss on Earth she had imagined. Not sun on her face, light wind and her fingers in his hair, green grass under both their naked feet. Not gentle lips and shared laughter tinged with joy. No.

The ground is dark and wet under their boots, and the only naked skin she can feel is his face and his hands, the rest covered in thick cloth. His lips aren't gentle, the tug on her bottom lip almost desperate until she parts her lips in a sigh. There is no sun, and a hat covering his hair, and he locks her hand against his chest when she tries to remove it.

Right. Bill has a terrible taste in hats. She'll just have to live with it, and kiss with it, and hope it has an unfortunate accident involving a Raptor and a nuke.

He doesn't take it off the whole day, and she lives with that.

II

"I don't like your wig," Bill tells her, and it takes her a moment to hear it over the noise of medical equipment and her own rising nausea.

He's closed the book he's been reading aloud, and she looks up to meet his gaze, as intense as it is gentle.

"There wasn't a huge selection," she counters, wondering why he wants to talk about this now, of all times. The Fleet is having a near-breakdown, his pilots are overworked with constant recons of a silent Earth, the Cylons have been so quiet they must be plotting something and she's gone back to treatments. There's no lack of topics to raise.

"You don't have to wear one," he tells her, and he probably means that.

"I do," she says, putting her hand on the book he's still holding, touching him while not. "I need. You don't."

There is a way she won't have to wear one at all, she doesn't say. Frak the treatments. Stop buying time. Just stop. He doesn't want to hear that, and she doesn't want to tell him. Not yet. Perhaps never.

He nods, putting his glasses back on. "Red is still the best colour on you."

She doesn't stop wearing her wig, but she knows what he sees every time he closes his eyes and doesn't argue with that.

II

"I'm sure there are five Cylons," she tells Bill, leaning against her desk and watching Earth through Colonial One's window. It looks so blue like that, she notes. So beautiful she wants to hate it. "D'Anna said five. I'm sure. But we only know of four now."

"Chief, Tory, Anders and Saul," Bill supplies, his voice falling slightly at the last name.

"I never suspected Tory," she continues. "You never suspected Colonel Tigh. By all accounts, not even they suspected until recently. What if the fifth doesn't know? It could be any of us. It could be..."

She doesn't finish the sentence, but she does meet his eyes when he walks over. This close, the lines on his face seem almost like scars, but they don't mar his skin at all. Not to her.

"I don't want to be afraid we have another sleeper agent with everything else we have to deal with," she whispers, and puts her head against his shoulder. He kisses the top of her head, not trying to reassure her. He can't.

She refuses to be afraid she loves a Cylon, not when he has the most human heartbeat she knows.

II

"I can't let you go," Bill says matter-of-factly, kissing her temple, tracing the curve of her ears by his fingertips. She shivers a little, her shirt brushing against his uniform as they continue their half-dance across his quarters. Towards his bunk, she's pretty sure. It might even be her leading.

"I'm not leaving," she whispers, feeling clumsy as her fingers struggle with unbuttoning. Some pieces of clothing should come with a undressing manual, and that apparently includes an Admiral's uniform.

"You're cutting down on treatments. Doc Cottle told me."

"I need to. Just for a little while, Bill. I can't have that much poison in my system. Not right now."

He breathes; she finally manages to push his uniform off and kiss the skin of his chest above his tank top. With less diloxin in her system, every touch feels strangely heightened.

She isn't sure what Bill fears the most; to not be able to live without her, or be forced to do so. She isn't sure which of them she fears the most either.

"I hate your cancer, Laura," he says, lifting her arms as he pulls her shirt off her.

"Me too," she whispers, resting her hands in his hair as he lowers his head against her. "I love you."

Bill is afraid, and not even her body can reassure him, she knows. Not when it's the cause of it.

She still lets him have it.

II

"The Quorum might raise a vote of no confidence against me," she tells him, and his hands pause in massaging her feet for a moment, before picking up with increased energy. She sighs a little into it, leaning further back in his chair.

"They won't," Bill says, every bit the Admiral giving an order.

"You can't hold your hand over me, Bill. They're disappointed with what I've led them too. They have a right to express it."

"We all believed in Earth."

"You didn't," she reminds him, and his look is almost hurt. "It was me. All the decisions I've made, in light of what I led us to seem so..."

"Madam President," Bill says, pushing her foot slightly up and kissing her knee almost reverently. "You led us to survival."

There never is a vote in the Quorum, but Laura never stops waiting for it.

II

"Saul was my best friend," Bill whispers against her skin, his hands warm on her back and his breath hot against. "He wants me to hate him now."

"Do you?" she whispers, resting her head against his pillow, clutching the fabric a little when he kisses the base of her neck.

"No. He wants me to hate him so he can justify hating himself."

"Is he going to do something stupid?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore, Laura."

She arches her back into his chest, pushing against him as he almost sits up and his thighs are hard against the back of hers.

"I know," she whispers. "I thought I was the dying leader. I really thought I was. I don't know anymore."

When she tilts her head back and kisses him, she isn't sure if it's her tears or his she is tasting.

II

Somewhere beyond the horizon, there are clouds, Laura knows. But today, it's a sunny day.

Two weeks after they first landed, she finds herself once against standing on Earth's soil, watching another set of ruins. Another part of the planet, this, still no survivors but with less radiation.

Habitable. They can settle here. If they want to.

If.

Bill is watching her, her hand in his and the hat returned to his head. She is even less sure what its purpose is in the sun, but it's growing on her. Like he has.

"I don't know," she admits, watching how treacherously blue the sky is. Like the planet. "Can we really settle here and make a go of it, Bill? After everything? Find Earth like this was such a..."

She exhales, the familiar disappointment and grief slamming into her. Even after two weeks, it feels like being run over by a basestar.

"Yes," Bill says simply, and she looks up at him to see her own emotions mirrored. Mirrored, not doubled; shared, held and halved between them. "It was."

When he kisses her, it still isn't the kiss on Earth she imagined. Even with the sun, even when he takes the hat off and puts it on her so she can lace her fingers in his hair, even with his lips gentle and caressing and comforting. The illusion is broken, and she doesn't have enough glue.

It is what it is. A ravaged, but habitable planet. A dying, but not dead President. A tired, but still fighting Admiral. A rag-tag Fleet, but one that still made a family. Humans and Cylons, but maybe enough shared humanity between them.

A sunny day on an Earth nothing like imagined, future still in the clouds, comfort in his presence and she finally, finally lets herself grieve what they never had.

It is what it is.

Just have to live on with that.

FIN


End file.
